from the that's-not-a-plan dept

Big city budgets are hellaciously complicated affairs. That much is obvious, but the actual level of management of a budget likely goes far beyond what the average member of the public realizes. Even with that stipulated, the city of Chicago's budget is an absolute mess. Budget shortfalls abound for any number of reasons, ranging from bloated payrolls, to pet projects that have missed the mark on cost projections, to a shortage of income related to police and parking activity from our infamous redlight cameras and our equally infamous privatization of parking meters. Anyone looking to solve this budget crisis is likely to begin pulling their hair out immediately, wondering where to even begin.

Beale, who chairs the City Council Transportation Committee, said he hopes Emanuel will revisit the idea of higher fees and tougher regulations on the burgeoning ride share industry as part of budget talks for 2018. He said the move would help even the playing field for cab drivers finding it increasingly difficult to compete. Beale wanted a per-ride charge of $1 on ride share companies as part of Emanuel’s 2016 budget. Instead, Emanuel raised the charge from 30 cents to 52 cents per ride.

“We should have went for the dollar and we negotiated down to the 50-cent (fee),” Beale said Wednesday. “Now here we are again, going for the dollar. And so, I think we could have been much further along if we had just stuck to our guns and gone for the dollar a couple years ago.”

Chicago has been a battleground of sorts in this fight between taxis and ride-sharing services. The per-ride fee instituted in 2016 came on the heels of a city-wide protest by taxis in 2015, where cabs refused to pick up fares in the downtown area and instead just honked their horns a bunch while those of us that work down here tried to actually do our jobs. The protest was designed not so much to rally public support to their side, as the public's voting with their wallets is what got us here in the first place. Rather, it was designed simply to be a pain in the city's ass enough for city officials to write in higher per-ride fees into its licensing legal framework.

And to that extent, it worked. The fee went up by a third or so. For Beale to lament the lack of a 300% increase in fees and, more fallaciously, to frame the desire for that increase as a budget solution when it is nothing of the sort, is fairly laughable. The real reason for Beale's angst is that he is the errand boy of Chicago's taxi companies, plain and simple. This is pure entrenched player protectionism and regulatory capture in reverse, with taxi companies looking to regulate more innovative and useful companies to death, or at least into some sort of insane fairness coma.

That isn't how government is supposed to be done, but it sure is the Chicago way.

from the this-is-not-good dept

Australia is providing a fairly stunning case study in how not to set up a national hotline for sexual assault, rape, domestic abuse and other such situations. It has a service, called 1800Respect, which lets people call in and be connected to trained counselors from a variety of different call centers around the country. However, as Asher Wolf informs us, a change in how the system will be managed has created quite a shit storm, and leading one of the major providers of counselors to the program to remove itself from the program -- meaning that it will likely lose government funding and may go out of business entirely.

The issues here are a bit convoluted, but since its inception, 1800Respect has actually been run by a private insurance company, Medibank Health Solutions, who partners with organizations who can provide qualified counselors. One of the big ones is Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia (RDSVA). While it already seems somewhat troubling that a private insurance company runs the "national" rape and domestic violence hotline -- it's even more troubling when you find out that the company views the service as a profit center:

Earlier this year Medibank healthcare and strategy group executive Andrew Wilson told The Australian that the services offered, which include BeyondBlue, Nurses on Call and After-hours GP as well as 1800 RESPECT, are an active part of their business.

"We have put a stake in the ground and said we'd like to double the operating profit of this part of the business in the next three years."

Over the past year, Medibank changed how the service was run, having the first line of people responding to calls doing more of a triage effort to figure out who really needs to talk to a counselor and who can just be pointed to information. Medibank claimed this was to better serve callers' needs -- and to enable more people to reach a counselor, but there have been lots of concerns about this.

And it came to a head a few weeks ago, when RDSVA, whose contract with 1800Respect was up, announced that it was leaving the program entirely, in part because part of the new contract demands from Medibank would have involved having to hand over all of the confidential notes it had on callers.

The new 1800RESPECT contract written by Medibank required Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia to handover all client file notes resulting from the past six years of counselling for the 1800RESPECT service. We firmly believe that this would breach client confidentiality and contradict Australian privacy legislation.

This requirement causes even greater concern due to Medibank’s position that they will not evoke communications privilege to protect client confidence. Medibank have also provided limited guarantees for the protection of counselling notes if Medibank were to be sold. It is the view of Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia that this requirement of the contract cannot be met legally or ethically.

The concerns about Medibank are hardly theoretical. Just a couple years ago the company had a major security breach, sending all sorts of details on Australian military personnel to China.

RDVSA also notes other problems with the contract, including requiring that all notes be kept in an online service from Medibank, that RDVSA says it evaluated for its own needs and found that it was not sufficient. And then there's stuff about call recording, and whether or not those recordings will be protected from being accessed in a lawsuit:

Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia is deeply concerned that the new contract would require counsellors to sign an agreement directly with Medibank for their counselling calls to be recorded. Callers to 1800RESPECT may now experience not only the written documentation being provided to the Courts but they may also experience release of the voice recording.

Sexual assault and domestic violence services have worked over many years with government to establish communications privilege to protect client’s therapeutic records from being misused in legal proceedings. Medibank holds a position that it will not engage in communications privilege actions when client files are subpoenaed.

There's more to it as well, but especially when talking about information as sensitive as sexual assault hotline calls, which may create very real risks of more violence or even death for those who choose to call, the entire setup here sounds horrifying. The focus of such a hotline shouldn't be turning it into a larger profit center for an insurance company, but rather 100% focused on helping those calling in -- and that includes protecting their privacy.

from the torturing-words dept

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recently pitched a new form of backdoor for encryption: "responsible encryption." The DAG said encryption was very, very important to the security of the nation and its citizens, but not so important it should ever prevent warrants from being executed.

According to Rosenstein, this is the first time in American history law enforcement officers haven't been able to collect all the evidence they seek with warrants. And that's all the fault of tech companies and their perverse interest in profits. Rosenstein thinks the smart people building flying cars or whatever should be able to make secure backdoors, but even if they can't, maybe they could just leave the encryption off their end of the end-to-end so cops can have a look-see.

This is the furtherance of former FBI director James Comey's "going dark" dogma. It's being practiced by more government agencies than just the DOJ. Calls for backdoors echo across Europe, with every government official making them claiming they're not talking about backdoors. These officials all want the same thing: a hole in encryption. All that's really happening is the development of new euphemisms.

[Encryption is] "definitely good for America, it's good for business, it's good for individuals," Joyce said. "So it's really important that we have strong encryption and that's available."

Every pitch against secure encryption begins exactly like this: a government official professing their undying appreciation for security. And like every other pitch, the undying appreciation is swiftly smothered by follow-up statements specifying which kinds of security they like.

"The other side of that is there are some evil people in this world, and the rule of law needs to proceed, and so what we're asking for is for companies to consider how they can support legal needs for information. Things that come from a judicial order, how can they be responsive to that, and if companies consider from the outset of building a platform or building a capability how they're going to respond to those inevitable asks from a judge's order, we'll be in a better place."

In other words, Joyce loves the security encrypted devices provide. But he'd love them more if they weren't quite so encrypted. Perhaps if the manufacturers held the keys… The same goes for encrypted communications. Wonderful stuff. Unless the government has a warrant. Then it should be allowed to use its golden key or backdoor or whatever to gain access.

Once again, a government official asks for a built-in backdoor, but doesn't have the intellectual honesty to describe it as such, nor the integrity to take ownership of the collateral damage. Neither the White House nor Congress seem interested in encryption bans or mandated backdoors. The officials talking about the "going dark" problem keep hinting tech companies should just weaken security for the greater good -- with the "greater good" apparently benefiting only government agencies.

This way, when everything goes to hell, officials can wash their hands of the collateral blood because there's no mandate or legislation tech companies can point to as demanding they acquiesce to the government's desires. Officials like Joyce and Rosenstein want all of the access, but none of the responsibility. And every single person offering these arguments think the smart guys should do all the work and carry 100% of the culpability. Beyond being stupid, these arguments are disingenuous and dangerous. And no one making them seems to show the slightest bit of self-awareness.

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

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from the perhaps-there-oughta-be-a-law dept

In the wake of the news about Harvey Weinstein's apparently serial abuse of women, and the news that several of his victims were unable to tell anyone about it due to a non-disclosure agreement, the New York legislature is considering a bill to prevent such NDAs from being enforceable in New York state. According to the Buzzfeed article the bill as currently proposed still allows a settlement agreement to demand that the recipient of a settlement not disclose how much they settled for, but it can't put the recipient of a settlement in jeopardy of needing to compensate their abuser if they choose to talk about what happened to them.

Like with the federal Consumer Review Fairness Act mentioned above, the proposed New York bill recognizes that there is a harm to the public interest when people cannot speak freely. When bad things happen, people need to know about them if they are to protect themselves. And it definitely isn't consistent with the public interest if the people doing the bad things can stop people from knowing that they've been doing them. These NDAs have essentially had the effect of letting bad actors pay money for the ability to continue the bad acts, and this proposed law is intended to take away that power.

As with any law the devil will be in the details (for instance, this proposed bill appears to apply only to non-disclosure clauses in the employment context, not more broadly), and it isn't clear whether this one, as written, might cause some unintended consequences. For instance, there might theoretically be the concern that without a gag clause in a settlement agreement it might be harder for victims to reach agreements that would compensate them for their injury. But as long as victims of other people's bad acts can be silenced as a condition of being compensated for those bad acts, and that silence enables there to be yet more victims, then there are already some unfortunate consequences for a law to try to address.

Rosenstein apparently has decided UK government officials shouldn't have a monopoly on horrendous anti-encryption arguments. Saddling up his one-trick pony, the DAG dumped out a whole lot of nonsensical words in front of a slightly more receptive audience. Speaking at the Global Cyber Security Summit in London, Rosenstein continued his crusade against encryption using counterintuitive arguments.

After name-dropping his newly-minted term -- responsible encryption™ -- Rosenstein stepped back to assess the overall cybersecurity situation. In short, it is awful. Worse, perhaps, than Rosenstein's own arguments. Between the inadvertently NSA-backed WannaCry ransomware, the Kehlios botnet, dozens of ill-mannered state actors, and everything else happening seemingly all at once, the world's computer users could obviously use all the security they can get.

Encryption is key to security. Rosenstein agrees… up to a point. He wants better security for everyone, unless those everyones are targeted by search warrants. Then they have too much encryption.

Encryption is essential. It is a foundational element of data security and authentication. It is central to the growth and flourishing of the digital economy. We in law enforcement have no desire to undermine encryption.

But “warrant-proof” encryption poses a serious problem.

Well, you can't really have both secure encryption and law enforcement-friendly encryption. Rosenstein knows this just as surely as Comey knew it. That didn't stop Comey from pretending it was all about tech company recalcitrance. The same goes for Rosenstein who, early on in his speech, plays a shitty version of Sympathy for the Tech Devil by using the phrase "competitive forces" as a stand-in for "profit seeking" when speaking about the uptick in default encryption.

The underlying message of his last speech was that American tech companies should spurn profits for helping out the government by unwrapping one end of end-to-end encryption. The same pitch is made here, softened slightly in the lede thanks to the presence of UK tech companies in the audience. The language may be less divisive, but the arguments are no less stupid this time around.

In the United States, when crime is afoot, impartial judges are responsible for balancing a citizen’s reasonable expectation of privacy against the interests of law enforcement. The law recognizes that legitimate law enforcement needs can outweigh personal privacy concerns. That is how we obtain search warrants for homes and court orders to require witnesses to testify.

Warrant-proof encryption overrides our ability to balance privacy and security. Our society has never had a system where evidence of criminal wrongdoing was impervious to detection by officers acting with a court-authorized warrant. But that is the world that technology companies are creating.

I'm not sure what this "system" is Rosenstein speaks about, but there has always been evidence that's eluded the grasp of law enforcement. Prior to common telephone use, people still communicated criminal plans but no one insisted citizens hold every conversation within earshot of law enforcement. Even in a digital world, evidence production isn't guaranteed, even when encryption isn't a factor.

Going on from there, the rest of speech is pretty much identical to his earlier one. In other words: really, really bad and really, really wrong.

Rosenstein believes the government should be able to place its finger on the privacy/security scale without being questioned or stymied by lowly citizens or private companies. Even if he's right about that (he isn't), he's wrong about the balance. This isn't privacy vs. security. This is security vs. insecurity. For a speech so front-loaded with tales of security breaches and malicious hacking, the back end is nothing more than bad arguments for weakened encryption -- something the government may benefit from, but will do nothing to protect people from malicious hackers or malicious governments.

All the complaints about a skewed balance are being presented by an entity that's hardly a victim. Electronic devices -- particularly cellphones -- generate an enormous amount of data that's not locked behind encryption. The government can -- without a warrant -- track your movements, either post-facto, or with some creative paperwork, in real time. Tons of other "smart" devices are generating a wealth of records only a third party and a subpoena away. And that's just the things citizens own. This says nothing about the wealth of surveillance options already deployed by the government and those waiting in the wings for the next sell off of civil liberties

It also should be noted Rosenstein is trying to make "responsible encryption" a thing. He obviously wants the word "backdoor" erased from the debate. While it's tempting to sympathize with Rosenstein's desire to take a loaded word out of the encryption debate lexicon, the one he's replacing it with is worse. As Rob Graham at Errata Security points out, the new term is loaded language itself, especially when attached to Rosenstein's bullshit metric: "measuring success in prevented crimes and saved lives."

I feel for Rosenstein, because the term "backdoor" does have a pejorative connotation, which can be considered unfair. But that's like saying the word "murder" is a pejorative term for killing people, or "torture" is a pejorative term for torture. The bad connotation exists because we don't like government surveillance. I mean, honestly calling this feature "government surveillance feature" is likewise pejorative, and likewise exactly what it is that we are talking about.

Mr. Rosenstein plainly wants to reopen the "going dark" debate that began under the previously administration, spearheaded by FBI Director Jim Comey. While I disagree vehemently with him, it's a valid policy position - and I have every reason to believe him that there are investigations in which encryption does hamper the Justice Department and FBI's ability to investigate. However, he is not entitled to mislead the public in order to make that point. And make no mistake. Attempting to use the spectre of familiar computer security challenges in order to make the argument that his policy is necessary, even though his policy has nothing to do with these challenges, is the height of intellectual dishonesty.

There's an endgame to Rosenstein's dishonest rhetoric. And it won't be tech companies being guilted into participating in his "responsible encryption" charade. It will be backdoors. And they will be legislated.

The Deputy Attorney General says that he is interested in "frank discussion". However, his actual remarks demonstrate he is interested in anything but -- his goal is to secure legislation akin to CALEA for your cellphone, and he doesn't care who he has to mislead to accomplish this. Mr. Deputy Attorney General, I expect better.

This is what the DOJ wants. But Rosenstein is too weak-willed to say it out loud. So he spouts this contradictory, misleading, wholly asinine garbage to whatever audience will have him. Rosenstein is obtuse enough to be dangerous. Fortunately, most legislators (so far) seem unwilling to sacrifice the security of citizens on the altar of lawful access.

from the mortified dept

Todd Weiler, a state Senator in Utah, has appeared on our pages before. When last we checked in with the good senator, he was quite oddly attempting to purge his notoriously prudish state from the dire threat of pornography. His plan was more than a bit heavy-handed in that it centered on mandating porn-filtering software on all smartphones under his stated theory that "A cell phone is basically a vending machine for pornography." This tragic misunderstanding by a sitting state senator of what a phone is and exactly what its primary functions are aside, government mandates that infringe on free and legal expression are kind of a no-no in these here secular United States. Even setting constitutional questions aside, attempts like these are immediately confronted by the obstreperous demands from the public for a definition of exactly what constitutes "pornography."

Well, for Senator Weiler, it appears we may have something of an answer. See, Weiler has more recently decided to try to revive Utah's long-defunct Obscenity and Pornography Complaints Ombudsman position, or "porn czar", that Utah once filled but has left vacant for the better part of two decades.

For the past 14 years, Utah has made do without a "porn czar." The position—officially known as the "Obscenity and Pornography Complaints Ombudsman"—has been vacant since 2003, though it was never officially eliminated. Now state Sen. Todd Weiler (R–Woods Cross) may revive it, even as the Utah attorney general suggests legislators strike it from the books. Weiler suggests that an obscenity ombudsman could focus on things like providing guidance to retailers. But the position also has the power to monitor and punish business owners for daring to display magazines that mention sex.

If all of that seems so broad a mandate that non-pornographic magazines might accidentally be caught up in the fray, you're wrong. Those innocent magazines aren't collateral damage at all, in fact, but rather the primary targets apparently of Weiler's ire.

Weiler's definition of porn is apparently broad enough to encompass mainstream women's magazines. Weiler "says he became convinced that the obscenity and pornography complaints office may be needed because of an ad campaign attacking Cosmopolitan magazine as illegal porn," The Salt Lake Tribune reports.

"I've received some complaints...that stores are selling Cosmo at eye level to a child," he told the Tribune. "There's no blinder rack on it, even though we have some blinder rack language in the state code."

Cosmo is and has been the butt of many a joke, but pornography it most certainly is not. And, jokes aside, the magazine is a source and platform for women to discuss and learn about both women's general and sexual health. Painting a porn target on a magazine such as that says everything about why these sorts of efforts must be defeated. No matter how uncomfortable it might make a Utah state senator for women to be real live human beings with body functions about which they need to learn, and no matter how distasteful that senator might find women discussing their health and sex lives in print, it should be plainly obvious that Cosmo is not remotely pornographic by any traditional understanding.

from the you-said-it dept

Trump's base brush this off as a flippant remark(like they do for everything he does from his bull pulpit).

But flip back a year and imagine the shit-fit the right would be throwing right now if Obama said this exact same thing about Fox News. It would be insanity. Hell imagine if Obama said literally half the things Trump says now. They would be foaming at the mouth.

Yes, there is something wrong, but there are also ways to correct it without government interfering. News organizations rely on their reputations. Simply outing them (you know, actually pointing out specific things that are fiction or lies, and proving so) would easily destroy their reputation for people who are seeking truth in news.

People who are seeking echo chambers or who are willfully ignorant are another story, but that's their right as free people correct?

The answer has to be in teaching the population critical thinking and why the objective truth is valuable, the consequence of echo chamber isolation / willful ignorance.

It's worse if there is deliberate systematic targeted misinformation.. (Like to manipulate the U.S. population to do whatever Russia wants for example)

Unfortunately, platforms are the sexy, new thing that everyone loves. Close down the hatches and let a single company create a 'platform'.

Email doesn't have this problem because it is a Protocol. Twitter has the problem because it is a platform. BitTorrent doesn't censor applications, because it is a protocol. The Apple App Store has a problem because it is a platform.

So the more we feed into Platform culture, the more you will see people putting arbitrary control over how people use it. Not necessarily good or bad; it is their right as the platform curator, but we just need to understand curators will censor at their whims because reasons.

from the adapt-or-perish dept

While Google Fiber was initially hailed as the be-all-end-all of broadband disruption, the bloom has come off the rose in recent months. Last fall, Google executives began to have doubts about the high cost and slow pace of the project, resulting in a not-yet cooked pivot to wireless and the departure of two CEOs in less than a year. Company PR reps seem unable to answer basic questions about cancelled installations and the unsteady direction of the project, which has also faced more than a few obstacles erected by incumbent ISPs unhappy about the added competition.

But Google Fiber has another problem: the slow but steady death of traditional television.

We've noted for some time how smaller cable companies are considering getting out of the pay TV business, since they lack the size and leverage to get the same rates enjoyed by sector behemoths like Comcast NBC Universal. Ultimately, you'll see many of these smaller cable companies shift their focus entirely to broadband, while nudging users toward over the top streaming services. As a smaller pay TV provider, Google is no exception, announcing last week that the company would be removing pay TV service from its service bundles moving forward:

"...We’re trying something new in our next two Fiber cities. When we begin serving customers in Louisville and San Antonio, we’ll focus on providing superfast Internet - and the endless content possibilities that creates - without the traditional TV add on. If you’ve been reading the business news lately, you know that more and more people are moving away from traditional methods of viewing television content. Customers today want to control what, where, when, and how they get content. They want to do it their way, and we want to help them.

That's a nice way of saying users weren't buying what Google Fiber was selling. The company doesn't reveal subscriber numbers, but while analysts have estimated Google Fiber's broadband subscriber count at somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million, the company's total pay TV subscriber count has long been relatively pathetic, with just 100,000 pay TV customers since the project's 2012 launch. Moving forward, Google Fiber makes it clear the company will stop fighting the current and nudge users to streaming alternatives instead:

Whether it’s through YouTube TV, Hulu, Netflix, or more specific targeted services -- there are so many ways to watch what you want, when you want it. And Google Fiber’s superfast Internet allows customers to make the most of all these streaming choices by providing the bandwidth to use multiple devices and apps at the same time.

What this means for Google Fiber's existing pay TV customers isn't clear, but it seems likely they'll ultimately lose service and be shoved toward discounted subscriptions for YouTube TV, Google's new live streaming video platform. But Google Fiber won't be the last pay TV provider to give up on traditional TV. We're entering a new era of mindless merger mania where we're intent on ignoring lessons of the past, making it increasingly difficult for smaller companies to gain a foothold in markets dominated by the likes of Comcast NBC Universal, or soon -- AT&T Time Warner.

And while Google Fiber hopes to have better luck focusing on broadband and streaming video, that's not an easy path either. These same TV sector giants (AT&T, Comcast) also have a growing stranglehold over streaming video licensing as well as the telecom market. And with the government gutting net neutrality and other protections beneficial to consumers and small businesses, getting a leg up in the broadband sector will soon be even more difficult than ever -- especially for those that lack Alphabet/Google's political power and healthy cash reserves.